1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the fields of social networking, data mining, and social computing. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a system and method for facilitating user-generated content relating to social networks.
2. Related Art
Market researchers, organizational psychologists, sociologists and application developers all have an interest in mapping social networks and social structures of individuals, groups, organizations, institutions and communities. Such data can be utilized to provide online and mobile services, engender social and organizational change, market products and services, and assist with research. Collecting such data is a major challenge with serious limitations existing in current methods.
Existing methods do not provide a simple way to derive the relationship between an individual's contact list on one or more social networking sites and the user's offline social ties. Standard pen and paper tools used by sociologists to map an individual's social network either provide comprehensive, detailed information about a small number of ties, or a small amount of information about a large number social ties. Also, these tools tend to be extremely time consuming for those being surveyed. Interpersonal communication data can be mined to provide information about organizational structures, contacts, and social networks. However, data mining techniques by themselves are limited by the representativeness of the data samples (e.g., they might just contain work e-mail addresses) and the ability to map the connection between communication pattern samples and real world social ties and structures.
It is known to provide web-based user interfaces for allowing users to tag content using user-defined tags. For example, the “gwap” system (http://www.gwap.com/) allows users to play online games which involve each user creating user-defined tags to describe an image. When the users agree on tags, points are awarded. The tags created by the users can then be used to improve future searches for content by search engines.
A major difficulty with the foregoing approaches is that it is too time consuming for subjects to first identify and then answer a significant number of questions about each of their social ties within a particular environment. Also, existing techniques do not allow for systematic, detailed modeling of the relationship between an individual or community's use of physical space and social structures. The present disclosure provides solutions to these problems.